Aspects of the present invention relate to Bluetooth communication.
Widespread availability and popularity of mobile devices have made them indispensible in both business and everyday use. These mobile devices include portable computing devices such as laptops, netbooks and tablets that provide mobile computing power as well as access to the information on the Internet, text messaging, email and other functions. Other mobile devices such as wireless phone devices not only provide the aforementioned portable computing functionality but further include wireless voice capabilities along with applications utilizing built-in cameras, global positioning satellite (GPS) services and others.
Convergence of mobile devices has resulted in a similar set of features offered in a variety of different form factors. Some of these shared features include powerful processors, increased battery life, larger displays, fully functional web-browsers, hi-fidelity sound systems and telephony capabilities. For example, wireless phone devices classified as smartphones may combine a small form-factor with powerful processors and multitasking operating systems previously available only on desktop computing devices. The smartphone device is generally small enough to fit in a pocket or purse and typically uses a touchscreen keyboard or miniature “thumb” keyboard for the easy entry of data.
Larger format portable computers deliver almost the same set of features as the smaller form-factor devices. Because they are larger, they deliver a longer battery life, more powerful computing power, wired/wireless networking and larger displays. Telephony is added to these devices using protocols/services such as voice-over-IP (VOIP) and Skype (Skype is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries of Skype Technologies S.A.).
Despite these many advances, mobile devices still have difficulty communicating directly with each other or, for that matter, desktop computers or workstations. When people wish to exchange information, they still generally send an email or text message with their mobile device to the mobile device of the person they are trying to reach. Likewise, mobile devices attempting communication with a desktop computer have little choice but to send the user of the desktop computer a brief email or text message as well. Unfortunately, manually entering information needed for emails or text messages is time consuming, prone to error and often dissuades people from interacting altogether.
Indeed, attempts to establish direct communication between mobile devices has been met with failure for a variety of reason. In many cases, too few devices have the specialized hardware required for communication. For example, infrared transceivers are not found on all mobile devices or computers and therefore lack the scale required to permit reliable communication. Moreover, infrared communication is not only slow but also requires a line-of-sight between the transceivers of the devices to operate.
Bluetooth communication is another interesting wireless protocol shared by many mobile devices but fraught with problems. In particular, the delay associated with “pairing” Bluetooth devices is unacceptable. Users trying to communicate or send data over Bluetooth may opt for a simpler method (i.e., copying data to a thumb drive or other removable storage) than spend the time it takes to establish and use a Bluetooth connection. Time delay associated with Bluetooth pairing not only frustrates users but tends to make the data transmitted more susceptible to interception and security breaches.
Pairing delay associated with setting up a Bluetooth connection also impacts it's more basic use as a substitute for wires and cables. In the case of Bluetooth headsets, many people would opt to use conventional headsets and wrestle with a tangle of wires than attempt to troubleshoot the problems associated with making a Bluetooth connection. Rather than miss or lose a phone call, many find it quicker and safer to plug a headset into the headset jack of phone device than rely upon Bluetooth pairing.
Some have suggested improving the pairing delay of Bluetooth using barcodes on the screen of a mobile device. This approach involves displaying and reading bar codes from the display of the mobile device to improve the Bluetooth pairing process. Special bar codes can generally be displayed on a mobile device and then read by another device or computer having a camera or bar code scanner. However, processing bar codes in this manner can be difficult as each display device may need to be configured with different display parameters, aspect ratios, display resolutions and other factors to ensure the bar codes can be read reliably.